Mark's PhD project is about urban poor activism in Jakarta - that is activism by and for the urban poor - and how the activists struggle for changing the rampant urban poverty problematic in a transformative way. The research focus is on how the activists try to bring about urban resistance amongst the poor city dwellers by framing and using the urban poor problematic as a political issue. Analyzing daily life of the urban poor in connection with the political struggles of the activists, this PhD project is a comprehensive study of grass-roots struggles on the urban level happening in similar ways in many megacities in the world. Theories from the fields of urbanism, civil society and political economy inform this fieldwork-based project. The Indonesian focus in mind, the project aims at situating urban poor activism on the wider political map of urban politics in Jakarta, tracks down its development over time from the 1990s until today and aims at providing insight into what are the possible trends and impacts of urban poor activism and resistance in Jakarta in the future.
Mark has studied Southeast Asian Studies for the past ten years at the University of Bonn, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Leiden University. For his PhD project, prior to becoming affiliated with the Centre for East- and South-East Asian Studies in Lund, he had brief residencies in Leiden, at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), the European Graduate School in Saas Fee/Switzerland, and was hosted by the Research Centre for Politics and Government (PolGov), Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, for fieldwork in Indonesia. He can be reached at markphilipstadler [at] gmail [dot] com (markphilipstadler[at]gmail[dot]com)